I. The World Turned Upside-Down
Monou Fuuma scrubbed his face and flushed it with cold water from the running sink, turning the squeaking faucet off and staring down into the draining water. Water dripped off his nose and bangs, falling into the cloudy, soapy basin, breaking the translucent oil-film on the surface. He looked up into the mirror and gazed at his bleary-eyed reflection: a young man with the Mandarin collar of his leather coat open to reveal the dark bruises on his neck. What he had could not be called a ‘headache’ so much as a brain over-clocked and numb to the point that it slogged and felt physically heavy. His eyes refused to focus properly, blurring objects he stared at for too long. He would blink and forget what he was staring at and what he had been thinking about a second ago.
He vaguely knew he was in the basement of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, having been able to navigate himself through the concrete-and-glass, wrecked labyrinth of Nishi-Shinjuku at dusk to find one of the few buildings still standing, and that the ill-lit corridors and chambers contained therein were the lair for himself and his comrades. But, only a fraction of his brain focused on the people he passed. He wandered to the restroom adjacent to his chambers.
There was cold water in the restroom. Running water.
That was all he could focus on. It did not wake him from his stupor, but it cleared his thoughts. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, willing his thoughts to clear from the top of his brain to the base, slogging down and clearing the coils thickly, freeing the circuits for more information, more thought. Every time he succeeded he would open his eyes and his brain would fire from base to crown again, re-slogging itself.
Fuuma opened the mirror-cabinet and searched the shelves for painkillers, stopping to stare blankly and forget what he was looking for, grabbed a bottle of anti-acids, stared at it, put it back, closed his eyes and willed his loaded mind to clear, and finally grabbed a bottle of generic painkillers. He took six with a swallow of water cupped in his hands.
—That’s not so good for you. You should eat something. —
Fuuma closed the mirror-cabinet and stared at his reflection blankly, sliding the tips of his long fingers down the metal frame and off the diagonal crease where pieces met at the corner. He was a lean-faced young man, seventeen years old and only half-Japanese, lanky, uncommonly tall and broad in the shoulders and chest, and with the physical strength to match. Though youth was always evident, at the moment he looked profoundly lost, confused and longing for somebody older to walk into the room and ask him what was wrong so he could sit against the wall and talk for hours. None of the Dragons of Earth had ever seen doubt cross Kamui’s features, or anything so close as confusion at a sudden physical change around him—this doubt was obviously deeply-rooted and primordial, invading sectors tantamount to Kamui’s autonomous persona. This was no Kamui—this was a lost man, and Fuuma knew somehow that was inherently wrong. Though Fuuma’s mind’s eye could not see the idea so much as instinctively sense it, know its presence, as one sees clearly a scene just beyond one’s closed eyelids, he knew that it was just one missing piece in a world coming unraveled. The powers that be were looking up from their sleep, bowed heads in white cowls sniffing the air, and waiting in the heavy, static air.
Waiting for a storm.
“…what am I doing here?”
—This is the Dragons of Earth’s base. You are their leader, Kamui.—
“…my name is Fuuma.”
—It’s easier for people to remember your true colors if they call you ‘Kamui’. If you don’t insist, arbitrary as it is, they will forget.—
Fuuma stared at his reflection, half-thinking of the lady with dark hair and the rack who had given him a quizzical look upon entering, he knew, because he had forgotten to do something that involved causing an earthquake. She had pursued him and grabbed his arm when he did not respond; he had shaken her off, feeling her weight release and stumbling—overbalancing—then dragged himself into the restroom. He had forgotten to remove his heavy leather boots at the entrance; they kept his ankles stiff when he stumbled, supporting him at times, tripping him at others.
—I’ll never forget who I am.—
Fuuma walked blindly through the short corridor to the adjoining bathroom, leaning heavily on the wood-paneled wall until the wall ended and he stumbled into the open foyer. He scrabbled with the taps and started the water running, then sat down heavily on the edge of the bathtub, lifting one ankle onto the opposite knee. He fumbled with his shoelaces with stiff fingers and stopped halfway through unlacing one boot to stare, eyes un-focusing again.
His brain was full of lead from crown to pan, and it would not stop beating itself.
Fuuma finally managed to remove his boots and threw them against the wall, fumbling to pull off his socks and throwing them and his leather overcoat over his shoes. He numbly noticed that the water had long since filled the deep basin to its brim; the water was soaking over the tub’s edge and lapping at the seat of his jeans as steam curled around him. He twisted at the waist to turn the taps off and stopped, mesmerized by the reflection in the water.
—I’ll never forget who I am.—
Fuuma stared at the reflection, his hand poised over the tap, water still gushing into the pool. The reflection, though distant and fully self-possessed, was faintly melancholy beneath the straight face, a refraction of the identity Fuuma was trying to retain. Fuuma turned further around, pulling his closest knee up onto the tub rim to rest that ankle on his opposite knee. He could step onto the water—step over the reflection, and around each step water would spread in ripples, flat as the surface of glass through the steam—
Fuuma crashed through the water and gasped, rushing to the surface to take deep, desperate breaths.
Well, what the hell were you expecting to happen, you idiot? URGH—I hate wet jeans I hate wet jeans—
Fuuma waded to the edge of the tub and leaned toward the floor, gasping in the cooler, dryer air. After a moment he sighed and slid back into the hot water, wading backwards to the opposite end of the tub and resting against the wall. He slicked his hair back with his fingers and submerged himself to his chin, closing his eyes.
God, I’m exhausted.
—God’s not going to pay much attention to you, Kamui.—
Well, he paid enough attention to me when he chose me for this. He did not remember why or what God had chosen him for, though. Just that it was somehow God’s fault he was in a bathtub under the Metropolitan Building—in his jeans, no less, and they were clinging everywhere—talking to himself and suffering amnesia.
—Now you just sound like a spoiled child.—
Fuuma slid beneath the water.
I don’t even remember what I’m doing here.
—Don’t worry. I promise everything is going to work out as planned. No matter what happens.—
In the peripherally of his mind’s eye, he saw his mirror image sitting in the water, hovering above him and just out of the line of detailed vision. The mirror image sat with his back perfectly straight, detached, the glare from the room’s headlights darkening him even in Fuuma’s mental world. It was as though Fuuma could see through his eyelids, but as soon as he opened his eyes, he knew the apparition would disappear.
—Never forget that, Fuuma. You are always in control, no matter what. The future is still decided. No matter how things seem to change, it will always be the same in the end. And nothing will stop it.—
…am I waking up?
—No. I am going to sleep.—
Why?
—The future is taking an alternate path to its destination. Somebody wished this.—
Who? Wait; what’s going on? Wait—
—Never forget, Fuuma. They’ll try to turn you against us; they’ll try to poison your mind against us. They’ll make you ashamed of us. They don’t know. Don’t listen to them. They will believe what they want to believe about us, twist our true face to be nothing but a mask, because it is an easier ‘reality’ for them to handle. They will say that we are an illusion, that we have no substance.—
I don’t understand a word you’re saying.
—The Sumeragi is wrong about us.—
Wait, where are you going?
—The world is about to be turned upside down.—
The reflection was distant and sad, melancholy and world-weary, a man with all the pathos in the world.
And, for the first and last time until the apocalypse, Fuuma saw his own face reflected back at him.
--------------------------------
Fuuma gasped and awoke in a panic, breaking the surface and throwing himself over the edge of the tub to vomit water out of his lungs. He gripped the slick sides of the tub and gasped brokenly, retching, fighting for air and coughing the last vestiges of water out. He collapsed cheek-first onto the cold tub-edge, shaking and turning his face toward the cooler air away from the tub.
I hope you’re appeased for now, Fuuma. You can’t keep this nonsense up if you want to survive when I’m gone. You will drive yourself mad.
Fuuma knew that the man in sunglasses opposite the direction his head was turned had been sitting on the edge of the tub for a while. The latter was smoking, waiting patiently for Fuuma to stop shaking and catch his breath.
“…you could hang your coat in the linen closet if you’re hot,” said Fuuma, “since this is a sauna.”
Seishirou took a drag of his cigarette and smiled to himself. “It’s not like you care, so why are you pretending?”
Fuuma lifted himself out of the tub, peeling off his soaked shirt and wringing it out as he sat down to the other man’s left. It was a courtesy; Seishirou thought it rude when people sat to his right so he had to turn his head to see them, though given his heightened senses he had no need insofar as self-defense was concerned. Seishirou dug through his trenchcoat pocket and nudged a cigarette out of a crushed Mild Sevens box with his thumb, offering it; Fuuma took it and accepted Seishirou’s offer for a light, shielding the lighter flame with his hand. He inhaled deeply and allowed the nicotine to loosen his lungs.
“On that note, would it kill you not to wear your sunglasses in a basement?”
“Maybe not. People seem to survive the oddest things down here.” From Fuuma’s place to Seishirou’s side he could see the older man look sidelong at him from behind his glasses. “You were underwater for almost five minutes. That’s a guarantee of legal death in my profession.”
“Legal death profits you in your profession.”
“Which one?”
“Good point.”
Seishirou snorted quietly as Fuuma looked for a place to lay his shirt out to dry, realizing that he had flooded the bathroom floor about a meter radial from the tub’s base, and that Seishirou had probably magically dried himself a spot to sit. Fuuma flicked the shirt open and laid it across his thigh.
“Did you find the place all right?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve worked in Shinjuku long enough to know how to find the Metropolitan Buildings.” Seishirou smiled to himself. “The lady, what’s-her-name, Kanoe-san, almost had a cerebral hemorrhage when she saw me; she certainly does think she’s entitled to boss you around just because you’re nominally on her side, doesn’t she?”
“Did she give you trouble?”
“Nah, not really. She just wants me to show up to more club meetings and pay my dues.” Seishirou leaned back on his hands, cigarette between two fingers, and smiled at Fuuma. “Why are you being so formal, anyway? It’s not as if we’re not on very familiar terms.”
“Why are you pretending you don’t loathe my very existence, since I have taken away access from the one thing in the world that is special to you?”
Seishirou’s expression remained perfectly calm, though Fuuma sensed a tremor.
“…I thought we had discussed this.”
“We did, and I won—” Fuuma held up his hand as Seishirou opened his mouth to say something. “—which is why I won’t argue with you again.”
“…believe what you want.”
Seishirou took a long drag of his cigarette, exhaled, and removed his sunglasses with his cigarette pinched at the juncture of his fingers. He folded the glasses and placed them in his coat pocket, looking at Fuuma. Fuuma stared back, allowing his cigarette to dangle from his fingers, the heel of his palm pressed onto the tub’s rim. Point-blank Seishirou’s gaze almost made him look as though he had been knocked in the head too hard as a kid; his blank right eye made it look as though he focused off-center to the left. The steadiness and awareness in his living eye kept most people—those not jerking slightly in morbid shock—just short of cracking up, as though the laugh broke against the throat and the muscles seized at the brink of release.
Fuuma, not being Most People, snorted quietly anyway.
“I assume it’s working, though,” said Seishirou.
“Given the half-baked nature of your brilliant plan, I’d say it’s working shockingly well.”
“You’re not going to start with me again about why I’m doing this, are you?”
“Are you worried that I will?”
“No. I’m just wondering if it’s physically possible for you to sit in the same room as somebody without having to prove just how clever and insightful you are.”
“And I assume you’re so much more secure and… further along your ‘transcendental journey of awareness’ than I am.”
“I’d say so.”
“Besides, supposedly it’s much easier to sit alone with somebody in complete silence after you’ve slept with him. Maybe I’ll shut up.”
“Hmm.”
They did sit in silence for a while. Fuuma finished his cigarette and snubbed it out on the wet tub-edge.
“And to what do I owe the honor of your visit?”
Seishirou smiled. “Can’t friends visit one another without a reason? Call it an act of whimsy. I was in the area and I was wondering how you were doing. And maybe I wanted to see if I got any employee benefits I wasn’t aware of.”
“I think your attendance record cancels your ‘benefits’.”
Seishirou shrugged. “I have other obligations.” He leaned forward slightly and snubbed his own cigarette out on the side of the tub, staring levelly at Fuuma. “…how are you feeling?”
“You don’t care how I feel. You want to know about my mental state.”
“Emotions tie into that.”
“You know what I mean. And, as of this moment, my mental state is perfectly clear. Earlier, it was not.”
Seishirou arched his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“I hate to say that your plan just might be working.”
“Really?”
“Don’t play dumb. You’re not dumb…Seishirou-san.” Neither man’s gaze wavered, though Fuuma sensed a twinge lance through Seishirou’s chest that he also knew Seishirou could not identify. “Enough stimuli come into conjunction at one brilliant moment—four coinciding wishes, latent and half-realized, especially in your case—along with my own innermost desires, and it may just be enough to halt even the gears of destiny. Even that force that cannot be denied. If human will wielded by humans of power in this war coincides to this degree, toward a common goal, then perhaps—just maybe—it throws a wrench in the gears. And if the gears can be torn asunder before they break the wrench—the wrench may just contribute to their destruction.”
Seishirou arched his eyebrows sardonically. “…may it, now.”
“The wrench buys time.”
Seishirou thought for a moment. “You know, for all you talk about fate, do you really believe in it, Monou-kun?”
Fuuma was silent, though he arched his eyebrows slightly.
“It’s a shame, really, that you have not made that boy realize your dream, for all you’ve done to him to make him realize it.”
“And you think you know what that is.”
“It’s obvious, really.”
“Really.” Fuuma tapped his fingers on the side of the tub. “For all you think you know about humans, you have no idea how to navigate your own intentions and desires, do you? And maybe you’re not always right about others anyway.”
Seishirou snorted. “And so you want to try to turn this on me and use some weak pseudo-insight like that. Very creative one, too.”
“In the first place, next time you want to pull something like this, don’t hide behind an excuse like ‘It is in the code that nobody can touch a Sakurazukamori’s prey’ when it’s evident to everybody and their dogs that you don’t give a fuck about decorum. You’re prideful, but you would never go this far for any other person. Only with this boy. Seishirou-san, have you stopped and realized that you are trying to stop fate in its tracks for the sake of this one person?”
Seishirou was quiet. Fuuma shrugged.
“You won’t hear my words until you realize them, and then, you’ll realize them because you’ll know.”
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You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
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When Seishirou stepped out of the Metropolitan Buildings the wreckage of the towering high-rises was ethereal in the pale-purple and pink stages of dusk. What was left standing of Nishi-Shinjuku’s white-and-gray concrete buildings were illuminating with red lights along their edges and geometric designs at the peaks, and a scattering of green-yellow in windows and in roof up-lights. Somehow the Shinjuku Park Tower had survived the earthquake; it stood alone, towering above ruins and wreckage roped by blinking caution signs and emergency vehicles still working on sifting through the wreckage for bodies. Most drivers had turned on their headlights, and traffic lights glared with a profoundness most heightened at twilight and dawn. Traffic was hell in Tokyo lately, especially in areas lying in ruin; despite Nishi-Shinjuku being declared a disaster area, the government’s workings could not stop, and so people still commuted every morning to the wreck, past the mass-gravesites of friends and colleagues.
It was from the building Seishirou was exiting that press releases were being given pleading people to start to move out of the city as quickly as possible, to avoid further death and to stagger an impending, sudden flood of millions of homeless into the surrounding areas. Lately Narita Airport had been an absolute zoo, with outgoing flights packed with Tokyo’s citizens desperate to get to neighboring cities or even nations before the choicest international doors slammed on Japanese refugees, and incoming flights less-packed with local aid and foreign aid volunteers from various first-world countries—the latter with their accompanying news-media eager to put on a show for primetime of the “Apocalypse in Tokyo”. From the tops of skyscrapers Seishirou could see lines of red taillights jamming the highways out of the city, bumper-to-bumper traffic to no end in sight across the mammoth metropolis, and sparse pairs of pale-gold headlights rushing into the city at top freeway speed.
It was difficult to appreciate how absolutely mammoth and sprawling Tokyo was until one had an aerial view of the city. Seishirou conjured a memory of the last time he had stood atop the Metropolitan Buildings at sunset. It was a long time ago, before ‘Kamui’ had started destroying the wards, before there were swaths of broken wreckage like graveyards of fallen, white stone, blinking with emergency lights and intermittently with a helicopter’s spotlight illuminating yawning chasms of shadow and twisted steel supports. As Tokyo was a staggering spread of packed buildings to the edge of the horizon, so were the swaths of wreckage staggering. One could see the vestiges of hundreds of thousands of ruined lives from one high vantage point, apartments collapsed in on themselves with hard-drives and photographs and rice-cookers and all the luxuries of modern life that have become addiction, necessity, the storage for our most basic needs and precious memories. One could walk into countless apartments and find a different story in the wreckage of each, scraps of photographs of seemingly random and stock people in school uniforms, in portraits, standing in front of monuments, at karaoke bars and on buses—mundane, and to others boring, but to those that left them, the entire world. One could find clothing and plastic hairclips and broken candle-glasses and receipts and the plethora of broken electronics, things people would wince to think of as being smashed by a beam or concrete. And, often, one could find corpses who had been robbed of life while doing their homework, sitting down to eat or in the shower, talking on the internet or chatting on the phone or watching television.
The deaths were still sudden and macabre even in light of the clear and present danger, most occurring without dramatics or the victims’ families and friends at hand for a good-bye. The last conversations one had with a victim were often along the lies of “Yeah, I’ll talk to you later; maybe I’ll have some time later to go out, but not tonight; I’m going to go home and crash—yeah, sorry, later—”
And, then, they were gone. Drawn government officials would inform yet another family, thinking themselves completely cold to the families’ heartbreaking reactions, but merely unaware of the fact that they felt as though they had been stabbed in the gut again and again until the stress finally accumulated and broke, all at once, over the un-aware officials. Word-of-mouth would get to peers, co-workers, and buddies—best friends and lovers first—and a numbness would settle. People would eventually grow colder to losing auxiliary friends and peers, only allowing themselves quiet mourning that evening at home, because life had to go on, and the victims’ families and close friends would mourn more than enough for them—the good guy from work, the one you sometimes drink with and hope works out his love life and finds himself that right girl; the girl in the office next-door who likes plastic pink hair-clips and can hold her alcohol better than men twice her size and tells the best stories when you guys are bored together. They’re all gone, picked off, with no clear pattern to distinguish who will be next amid the plethora of personalities. And there will always be a toast to them, a drink for them when it is time to go back to the bar, and fond and quick comments of what she would have said, he would have done, and a quick laugh. Kampai. Here’s to them.
And, always, a quiet fear that it would be themselves next, or a loved one; the more random the pattern, the more the seemingly idiosyncratic-to-the-point-of-immortality died, the greater the fear.
And, when the victim was somebody close to one’s heart—
It was one of the jerkier things Fuuma had done to Seishirou since they had started sleeping together. While they had stopped by the Ebisu ruins so Fuuma could talk about some girl with a stuffed frog and Seishirou could pretend to listen, walking with such confidence that government officials assumed they were cops, and visa versa, they had walked past a rescue effort to tug a corpse from beneath the concave roof of a concrete pavilion. Seishirou had seen a white-clad, broad-shouldered figure at first— head hanging like a marionette’s where the fallen wreck pinned it at the waist—ignored it, and jerked back, staring and blinking, assuring himself that the corpse was not Subaru-kun—not Subaru-kun—but its cropped black hair and form, slender neck cocooned in a turtleneck and broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist, were unmistakable. The panic only lasted a split-second, not even long enough to register in his mind, before he stared back at Fuuma and forgot what he had just felt. Fuuma was smiling to himself, quiet and Sphinx-like. Nearby an American cable news station was giving its Fair and Balanced News Report on the event, highlighting the American workers and their contributions to the rescue effort.
When Seishirou glanced back at the wreck, the body was that of a middle-aged man in a mauve-brown suit, and neither he nor Fuuma mentioned the illusion. But for a good few hours afterward Fuuma’s ‘I-have-you-figured-out’ attitude spiked, just beneath the surface, and it would have been insufferable if Fuuma had actually been right at all. Fuuma was convinced that deep down, Seishirou loved Subaru; Fuuma was a naïve child when it came right down to it, ‘Kamui’ or not. Seishirou was disappointed; he had been expecting sharper insight from the man rumored to have the ability to see into each person’s innermost heart.
Really. Fuuma was wrong and had no idea what he was talking about.
This was what Seishirou had kept telling himself from the start, in his conscious mind. But the slightest doubt—no more than a flicker, a faint beat—that had caught him when Fuuma had delivered his declaration had taken root, and was lapping at the edges of Seishirou’s consciousness, so lightly that he was not aware of its presence. He thought it was evidence of faulty logic, the intuitive knowledge of a missing piece in a puzzle. But that made no sense; he was thirty-four years old and sure that he had himself well-understood to a boring degree. He was not subject to the emotional peaks and swells of the rest of humanity, and though it was a boring existence, it was a solid identity.
Or so he could tell himself in the daytime. But at night, even for the past nine years, the faintest flickers of doubt, a ghostlike breath of dark at the fringe of his mind, had invaded his thoughts, and had made him uneasy because he felt the slightest unease, a foreign sensation—because for a second he had felt slightly confused, as though he were walking along the lip of some dangerous chasm. About to overbalance and fall, fall, but with a sense that it was all false, and that he could catch himself on the floor before he fell too deep. Uncertainty in the external world did not affect Seishirou; it passed him over like smoke, and he did not understand how people could be unnerved by it. Uncertainty in himself terrified him in ways no other person who knew him would think possible, in ways that he skillfully hid from every other soul, even from his conscious mind. The uncertainty and chaos were always just beneath the perfectly calm, analytical architecture of his mind, cool and stable and merciless as concrete—but those nights when even the slightest shadow flickered, he sat up in his living room staring out the open window at the city, smoking and dully wondering why he had the sense that something integral to his identity had shifted just out of line—a fraction, a hair, but the space between that shift and the perfect seam held all the answers he did not have.
What are you doing, Seishirou? Look at yourself. You’re going too far.
Seishirou realized that he was at his apartment door and automatically fishing for his keys in his coat pocket; he opened the door and turned on the lights before kneeling to untie his shoes. The washing machine was silent; his sheets were ready for the dryer. He stepped onto the floor and tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter atop spreads of scrolls, removing his coat and suit jacket and draping them over the back of a chair. By Tokyo standards, his apartment was sprawling, and though stylishly and comfortably furnished it was not at all extravagant or showy.
At the moment his usually-neat table was stacked half a foot high with papers, books, ancient scrolls, and a closed laptop in the small cleared space in front of a chair. Spreads and open books were weighted down on the kitchen counter revealing the chakras, points of energy along the human anatomy, and the more arcane and technical aspects of tantra. Some of the diagrams were very detailed; all but one were of a male-and-female couple, and the female had some of the original notes pointing to her body crossed out or edited to correspond to a male body. Notes in Seishirou’s messy, calligraphic hand were scrawled in the margins detailing necessary changes due to physical aspects and the more abstract circumstances. One diagram had an arrow pointing to the couple and a note written in a different, more angular hand: THIS JUST DOESNT DO ANYTHING FOR ME. Loose-leaf printed papers, packets, and a couple of scrolls were spread around the computer chair. The papers detailing hit-and-miss methods of interpersonal power manipulation were at the bottoms of the stacks, though a few were marked up and left out as auxiliary reference. Relative to the papers spread on the counter, the heaps of reference material on the table far outweighed. Seishirou had done his research, and he had scrimped and scoured the most exclusive and arcane—damn near impossible to understand—documents, many of which were accessible to the Sakurazukamori alone, to piece aspects together into one cohesive method. It was a long shot, but it was the closest shot he was ever going to get at such a ludicrous plan. Now was not a time to stand back from that cluttered table and place things in perspective, to realize the staggering enormity of what he was attempting and its horrifying consequences should his impact be too great and yet misfired. He was screwing with a system considered both delicate and impenetrable, transient and subject to micro-undulations and butterflies’ wings and, at the same time, decided beyond any shadow of a doubt.
It had not started this obsessively; Seishirou had not run to his family’s archives and gathered every book he could carry for multiple trips on the first day. It had started as a casual idea that had compounded upon itself, striving to reach perfection in every aspect, unnoticed until Seishirou realized one morning that he had lost a coffee mug because it was hidden among the sheer weight of paper.
Seishirou walked into the laundry room, unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, and gathered the damp, black-and-cream linens out of the washer with one hand while opening the dryer with the other. He smiled to himself, half-focusing on the wet fabric; having a washer-and-dryer was truly a luxury. It would be a pain in the ass to have to run his sheets to the laundromat as often as they needed to be washed lately.
Why are you doing all of this in the first place? Bring it back to the center—back to the center—
He dropped the heavy linens in the dryer and slammed the lid.
—the center is the reason, the reason is the answer. It is possible—no, we’ve already discussed this. To be honest with myself doubt indicates something I may have missed nine years ago—no, you’ve already evaluated.—Or are you afraid? No—no, I’m not afraid. That child is mistaken. Mistaken—I know myself too well for this.—
“…have you stopped and realized that you are trying to stop fate in its tracks for the sake of this one person?”
Seishirou’s hand halted over the ‘on’ button. He already forgot what he had just done, which knobs and dials he had turned to set the dryer. He stared at his hand with flagging focus.
—the center?
He had long since intellectually made the link—it was logical and obvious—but now—
It began as a dim realization, like the slightest catch in the depths of water with Seishirou staring straight ahead, expression perfectly still—creeping up, catching his heart in a barely-audible murmur, holding it as time suspends. A beat, a flutter in the root of his mind. And then, a numb void. His perception of time fuzzed out; he may have stood there for a full five minutes, or so, without noticing their passage.
He knew. He didn’t know what he knew, but he knew. And it was the start.
I am doing all of this for Subaru-kun.
And, for the first time, Seishirou consciously knew the meaning of fear from the heart.
